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DENVER — Evan Spencer Ebel ran up a long list of felony convictions before turning 21, joined a
white-supremacist gang behind bars, assaulted one prison guard and wrote that he fantasized about
killing others.

Along the way, he benefited from a series of errors in the criminal-justice system before he
became a suspect in the slaying of Colorado’s prisons chief and a pizza deliveryman.

He got out of prison four years early because of a clerical error in a rural courthouse. He
slipped his ankle bracelet and violated the terms of his parole last month, but authorities didn’t
put out a warrant for his arrest until after the killings of pizza deliveryman Nathan Leon and
corrections chief Tom Clements.

Ebel’s streak came to an end on March 21 after he was pulled over by a deputy sheriff in Texas.
He died after a car chase and shootout. The gun he used was the same used to kill Clements; the
trunk of Ebel’s car held a Domino’s pizza box and shirt.

“We have to do better in the future,” Tim Hand, the head of the Department of Corrections’
parole division, said yesterday.

Ebel entered Colorado prisons in 2005 after a series of assault and menacing charges that
combined for an eight-year sentence. He was supposed to serve four more years after that sentence
was fulfilled, but he was released on Jan. 28.

Charles Barton, chief judge of the 11th Judicial District, and court administrator Walter Blair
said in a statement that the court regrets the oversight “and extends condolences to the families
of Mr. Nathan Leon and Mr. Tom Clements.”

Absent a huge audit, there’s no way of knowing how common such random clerical errors might be,
said Bill Raftery, an analyst at the Williamsburg, Va.-based National Center for State Courts.